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I sometimes find myself trying to summarize and simplify the problems with hydrogen, only to find my listener's patience wear thin with all the technicalities. As such, I'd like to find and focus on one single, nearly insurmountable problem with hydrogen.

For the moment, I've been using its relative inefficiency; that is, that it takes a lot of energy to create cleanly, that there's just no way around it, and that in a world with limited resources, it's not a sustainable way to power cars. But I don't know if that's the strongest argument, or even if it is strictly true.

Taken together these problems means you don't just need 1 breakthrough, you need several AND someone willing to risk a lot of money on a very highrisk endeavour. It gets even worse when the Bluestar from Tesla means BEVs and their charging infrastructure will be so widespread they will be the entrenched technology. So Hydrogen NEEDS quite a few major breakthroughs now and commercialization within the next 3-5 years or they've lost. At least for cars.

I see a possible future in hydrogen based aviation or for stationary load-leveling applications like connected to remote windmills or PV.

I guess we could separate the problems like this: those solvable through better engineering, those solvable only through scientific breakthroughs, and those that cannot be solved because of some physical or molecular limitation. I realize the categories are highly arguable, but still I might group them like this:

Cat 1 (engineering): Infrastructure and fuel cell improvements. Expensive, but possible, especially with fuel cells, which have shown great improvements over the past twenty years.

Cat 2 (scientific): Pipeline, storage, leakage issues. New classes of metals probably need to be invented to help prevent embrittling, along with better containers, etc.

Cat 3 (physical/molecular): Hydrogen production, inefficiencies. Hydrogen is found on Earth very tightly bound to other elements, and takes a huge amount of energy to release it.

WIKI
Hydrogen fuel cell
The hydrogen fuel cell was presented by the film as an alternative that distracts attention from the real and immediate potential of electric vehicles to an unlikely future possibility embraced by automakers, oil companies and a pro-business administration in order to buy time and profits for the status quo. The film backs up the claim that hydrogen vehicles are a mere distraction by stating that "A fuel cell car powered by hydrogen made with electricity uses 3 to 4 times more energy than a car powered by batteries" and by interviewing the author of The Hype About Hydrogen, who lists 5 problems he sees with hydrogen vehicles (these are his paraphrased claims, along with exact quotations):

1. Current fuel cell cars cost an average of $1,000,000. This cost, in his words, "has gotta drop."
2. Current materials cannot store enough hydrogen in a reasonable space to "give you the range people want."
3. Hydrogen fuel is "wildly expensive." In his words "even hydrogen from dirty fossil fuels is two or three times more expensive than gasoline."
4. The need for an entire new fueling infrastructure. He claims "someone's gonna have to build at least ten or twenty thousand hydrogen fueling stations, before anybody is going to be interested."
5. Competing technologies will improve over time as well. "You have to hope and pray that the competitors in the marketplace don't get any better. Because right now the best car in the marketplace just got a lot better, the hybrid vehicle..."

I guess we could separate the problems like this: those solvable through better engineering, those solvable only through scientific breakthroughs, and those that cannot be solved because of some physical or molecular limitation. I realize the categories are highly arguable, but still I might group them like this:

Cat 1 (engineering): Infrastructure and fuel cell improvements. Expensive, but possible, especially with fuel cells, which have shown great improvements over the past twenty years.

Cat 2 (scientific): Pipeline, storage, leakage issues. New classes of metals probably need to be invented to help prevent embrittling, along with better containers, etc.

Cat 3 (physical/molecular): Hydrogen production, inefficiencies. Hydrogen is found on Earth very tightly bound to other elements, and takes a huge amount of energy to release it.

Click to expand...

That is basically the way I look at it too.
Some hydrogen fuel creation, storage, and fuel cell use seems prudent in some cases, but just doesn't seem like the right answer for the standard automotive power source. It makes tons of sense on spacecraft where you are already storing liquid hydrogen, need electricity and clean water as a byproduct is very useful.

Some hydrogen naysayers bring up the Hindenberg as the reason why hydrogen is too dangerous/flammable to use, but that argument "runs out of gas" rather quickly.

But hydrogen is seriously explosive though. I thought until pretty recently you needed a 2:1 hydrogen oxygen mixture to get an explosion. But you don't need that. I've seen demonstrated a normal balloon with a radius of maybe 5 inches filled with hydrogen ignited. At the back of the auditorium around 30 feet away from the balloon that was uncomfortable bang. Fun of course, but not comfortable If that would actually have been O2:H2 mix the power would have been many times stronger.

So you really want to make sure if you've got an oxygen tank that it doesn't mix with the hydrogen prematurely

1) Expensive: The cars, infrastructure, and fuel are expensive.
Solutions: continue engineering and bringing the costs down for hydrogen components to bring car prices down. Infrastructure, not much way to fix except to start building and hope costs go down with scale. Should be noted that the infrastructure still costs more than equivalent gasoline infrastructure, while EV fast charging infrastructure costs the same as gasoline infrastructure. Fuel prices are projected to be more expensive than gasoline even in volume, so there will need to be cheaper sources of hydrogen discovered.

2) Inefficient: An EV can almost always utilize the energy more efficiently.
Solutions: find sources of energy that EVs can't utilize or utilize as well, esp. renewable sources, examples are algae based hydrogen.

3) Hard to store/transport: volumetric energy density is low and there are still issues with leaking. But they are making good progress on this and the density still seems higher than EVs so far, though it's still isn't as easy to transport long distances as electricity.

I thought I saw a TV report when the Clarity came out that that the (subsidized) price of hydrogen would be $5 per kilogram, and that the eventual target was the same price. Romm says something similar:

Direct from the California fuel cell partnership, so I assume they know what they are talking about:

Early hydrogen station costs may vary depending upon the type of station, site conditions and experience of the builder. Estimated capital costs are approximately $2-4 million, not including land or operating costs. Using U.S. Department of Energy’s H2A delivery model, CaFCP estimates that early hydrogen stations could dispense fuel for $8-13 per gasoline gallon equivalent (untaxed) for a network that includes 20 stations delivering 400 kg/day using either gaseous or liquid delivery systems. A fuel cell vehicle is roughly twice as efficient as a gasoline vehicle, so this compares to gasoline at $4.00-6.50/gallon (untaxed) on a mileage basis. As with all new technologies, economies of scale and learning will reduce costs for stations and fuel. In the early years, government support is needed to offset risks, both to the station owner and the vehicle owner.

Doing the electricity cost conversion (pretax) you get 33.7kWh/gallon gas * $0.115/kWh US average residential = $3.88/gallon. A EV is 3-4x as efficient as a gas car, plug to wheel wise (Roadster is 132mpge assuming 90% charging efficiency & 244 miles of range, 117mpge assuming 80% charging efficiency & 244 miles of range) so that works out to $1.29-$0.97/gallon on a mileage basis.

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